Several years ago a researcher tried to determine how many potential (in this case exclusively heterosexual) matches were available to any student from, say, MIT, in the Boston area. The answer came so close to zero that in statistics it would be considered zero. Not everyone is Elvis. There are millions of people, gay and straight, who have to rely on the wildest stroke of luck to encounter a potential partner (and I don't mean that in the narrow sexual sense). What in the old days would be called "personal ads" are a perfectly legitimate way of meeting others. Prior to the general recognition of gay equality in these matters, personals were frequently employed in some countries other than the US to meet a heterosexual partner, with no stigma being attached. It was not intended that man (or woman) should be alone, but short of a god who can make a partner out of someone's rib, we must take advantage of the recourse presented by modern society.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach

I think dating apps could be of use for Adams in search of helpmeets. But now that ad-crazy FB has weighed in, I have to wonder whether an unguarded remark to a potential Eve about how much I would like an apple is going to get me plastered with Marie Callender's pies.

Past being prologue, I suspect that Mark Zuckerberg is much more inclined to broker big data than he is big dates.

Now, about half of Americans live alone or with pets only as companions. Instead of deciding that somehow this is wrong and they need to social engineer their audience so they will feel more comfortable, maybe they should accept us as we are and help us be more comfortable with our situation.

They can do this by letting their advertisers know what kind of audience they are addressing. Perhaps they could encourage grocery retailers, for example, to offer things in singles friendly portions. Instead of huge heads of lettuce half of which goes to waste, maybe they could sell us Boston bib lettuce, a smaller head which can be consumed over a period of a few days by a one person household. That's just an example. What Zukerberg is proposing reminds me of what Lenin & Stalin did in the Soviet Union. Instead of accepting human nature as it is and designing a state around the needs of its people, they decided to re-engineer human nature and create "a new Socialist Man" to meet the needs of the state.

Don't drink and drive. You might spill it.--J. Eugene Baker, aka my late father
"We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."--Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S. Carolina."Racism is America's Original Sin."--Francis Cardinal George, former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.

I agree there is a problem with FB that Zuckerberg did not, maybe could not be expected to, foresee—that if you create a virtual 'state of nature' for largely unregulated activity, viciousness will come to the fore and counterbalance desirable social interaction.